Rome crime and chaos meet the enforcer

Law-and-order right-wing mayor a fan of Rudy Giuliani

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 23, 2008

Gianni Alemanno is keeping his law-and-order promises, sweeping prostitutes off streets, arming traffic cops and pushing for immigrants who commit crimes to be deported.

But Rome's mayor is as hard to get a handle on as the city he governs.

He's a tough guy who is into meditation; a Rudy Giuliani fan who drones in bureaucratese; a former neo-Fascist street protester who champions organic food; an Italian who, in a nation of soccer fanatics, is indifferent to the game.

And he's a right-winger - the first to be elected mayor of the Eternal City since World War II.

His pledge to tackle rampant corruption and pollution, with zero tolerance for street crime, goes down well with Romans. But critics are alarmed by his past in the neo-Fascist movement and the xenophobic nerve he touches by blaming foreigners for crime and threatening to kick out immigrants who break the law.

When some of his supporters flashed Fascist salutes during his victory rally in April at City Hall plaza atop the Capitoline Hill, the critics were not reassured.

Much has been made of the Celtic cross, generally considered a symbol of the Italian far right, that Alemanno wears under his white shirt and dark suit. The mayor says it belonged to a political comrade who was murdered.

Alemanno has distanced himself from his past and says he just wants to turn Rome around.

"He who has made war can make peace," he told a TV interviewer two years ago when he was agriculture minister.

At 50, he himself is too young to have participated in any wars, unless taming the chaos in this city of 3.7 million can be called a war.

The Italian capital has nearly as many cars and mopeds as people, smothering the city in traffic and pollution. A more extensive subway system would help, but construction is slowed and even blocked when it threatens to undermine Rome's nearly 70 world-class archaeological wonders.

Petty crime is endemic, graffiti has become a serious eyesore, corruption plagues the sprawling bureaucracy, and the high cost of housing is driving out young couples.

Alemanno, an engineer by education, has tackled his task with relish. He drives around town in his modest Fiat Croma to listen to the concerns of citizens, whether on world-famous shopping streets or in the bleak neighborhoods that don't show on any tourist map.

Much of his appeal comes from denouncing past center-left administrations as elitist and caring more about concerts and film festivals than about public safety.

In a recent week, as he drove from a high-powered debate on citizens' problems to a community group, then to a news conference and several TV appearances, Alemanno kept pushing the law-and-order button.

"We have to overcome the sense that people in Rome feel unsafe," he told reporters, speaking in his characteristically unemotional way. "We can't have a city without regulations, where everyone does what they want to do."

Citing the former New York mayor as a role model, he says: "We are acting as Rudolph Giuliani did in his time - intervene, give precise rules and offer a different city."

He appears to be producing results.

The Interior Ministry says robberies and burglaries came down sharply during Alemanno's first summer in office, to 25,832 in June through August, compared with 41,894 in the same period last year.

But many say the tough-on-crime stance builds on a xenophobic streak that has been surfacing among Italians as immigrants pour in, many of them Romanians, including ethnic Gypsies.

Last year, the left-of-center government then in power cracked down on foreigners after 47-year-old Giovanna Reggiani, the wife of a navy commander, was robbed and left dead and half-naked in a ditch near a Gypsy migrant camp.

A Romanian in his 20s living in the camp, Nicolae Mailat, has been sentenced to 29 years in prison - a punishment the mayor says was too light.

In April, conservative Silvio Berlusconi was returned as premier, echoing the new mayor's tough talk by announcing plans to fingerprint Gypsies, including children.

A September poll in the opposition daily La Repubblica showed Alemanno with a 51 percent approval rating.

"If you ask people around here, they all give their support to Alemanno," said Carmelina Caranci, 52, a tobacconist in an upscale Rome neighborhood. "We voted for him, but we are not fascists. We just want people to be respectful and decent on the streets."

The leftist opposition has pointed to recent attacks on foreigners as evidence of growing racism in Italy, and puts some blame on Alemanno's rhetoric.

In recent weeks, a native of Burkina Faso was killed in Milan and a Chinese man was beaten up in Rome. The Roman Catholic Church in Italy has repeatedly warned the country to treat its immigrants humanely and has questioned Berlusconi's fingerprinting plans.

Alemanno's highest-profile move so far has been a crackdown on street prostitutes and their clients, which in its first two weeks levied more than 400 fines starting at $270.

For many, the hordes of scantily clad women on the streets, mostly from Eastern Europe, Africa and South America, were both an embarrassment and a nuisance, because they blocked traffic while negotiating prices with motorists.

The mayor has also won popular support for arming traffic cops with pistols. Until now only national police and paramilitary Carabinieri were armed in Rome.

Supporters say Alemanno has a softer side. He has a well-known passion for mountain climbing and high-altitude meditating. And he won environmentalist hearts with his outspoken support of organic foods and the Slow Food gourmet movement.

But he has a hard time escaping his political roots.

As a young man, he was picked up twice by police during neo-Fascist demonstrations, but was never convicted of a crime, according to his spokesman, Simone Turbolente.

He worked his way up through right-wing politics, and stayed with the National Alliance party, legal descendant of the outlawed Fascists, when it made its move into the political mainstream.

He is married to Isabella Rauti, daughter of a well-known far-right leader.

Recently, opposition politicians and Jewish leaders reacted with outrage to a newspaper interview in which he refused to condemn Fascism as an absolute evil.

Corriere della Sera newspaper published the comments as Alemanno was concluding a trip to Israel that included a stop at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

Alemanno denounced the anti-Jewish laws adopted by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini as evil but took a softer stance toward Fascism. "Many people joined it in good faith, and I don't like labeling them with that definition," he was quoted as saying.

Tullia Zevi, a former leader of Italy's Jewish community, questioned how someone with Alemanno's ideological background could be elected mayor of Rome.

"It pains me to think that there was a resistance (to Fascism), only to have such men come to power," she said.